1. Scope of the Invention
The present invention relates to electronic data transmission, and more specifically a system which automatically finds and transmits information to a service provider in one of a number of standard formats.
2. Related Prior Art
It is sometimes necessary to transmit information from an existing system, a legacy system, to other systems each having a required transmission format. This is the case in many areas but especially for Physician Office Management Systems (POMS) communicating information to insurance providers, such as Aetna, Blue Cross, Prudential etc. POMS are small computer systems used for record keeping in Physicians Offices.
Typically, small interface programs are manually written for each of the different provider standards for the specific POMS being used.
Today there are three ways to integrate with a legacy application:
write the interface code by hand, PA1 use a mapping tool, or PA1 use a screen scraping tool to help implement software for the integration.
Mapping tools
A mapping tool typically supports implementing an insertion or extraction routine from the legacy system. It does not help design the routines. The user of the mapping tool (typically a software engineer) supplies the mapping tool with a layout of the source data, a layout of the target data items and a mapping between the source and target data items. The mapping tool then implements this map.
Screen scraper
A screen scraper is a tool which monitors (and stores) inputs to the computer to determine order and type of screen inputs which are required by the legacy system.
The screen scraper is programmed to monitor a specific legacy system. To program a screen scraper, the user determines the sequence of screens (in the legacy system) needed to retrieve/insert the data from/to the legacy system. The user then runs the legacy application in conjunction with the screen scraper which monitors and identifies the screens that are to be scraped and tags fields in the screens that will be retrieved/filled by the screen scraper.
A user then writes a script (in the screen scraper's programming language) to start up the legacy application, maneuver from screen to screen and retrieve/insert data from/into the tagged fields in the legacy application screens.
After it has been fully programmed, the screen scraper can automatically run the legacy application entering values from an electronic source (such as a data file) into the appropriate user interface fields. It can also generate data files by automatically extracting data from the legacy system's screens.
Currently, there is a need for a system which automatically determines the disk format of the legacy data, and transmits the data required by a service provider to it in its required format.